Unlimited hosting vs reseller – Choosing the right hosting plan
This article is primarily aimed at people looking after several websites and are unsure whether to:
- Run multiple websites from a single cPanel hosting account
or
- Run multiple single cPanel hosting accounts
or
- Purchase a reseller plan and control multiple cPanel accounts.
It’s important to understand the differences between these options.
Unlimited website business hosting (Emerald, Sapphire, Diamond & Tanzanite)
The idea behind unlimited website hosting is to provide a single cPanel account with very few restrictions so you can run your websites and email without having to worry about running out of mailboxes, databases, number of domains etc.
Essentially it’s an all you can eat buffet – but like any sensible restaurateur, we do limit the size of your plate! In hosting terms, the size of your plate means memory, CPU power and I/O capacity (the ability to read and write data from and to the server’s disks).
These limitations shouldn’t come as a surprise - You’ll find most reputable hosting providers apply them because they protect other users should your account be abused.
The advantages of unlimited hosting
Greater performance than our Amethyst plan - If you are running just one or two websites from your cPanel account, and need greater performance (i.e. more memory, CPU, and I/O capacity to serve pages faster) then upgrading from our entry-level Amethyst plan is usually a logical and wise choice.
More space - Amethyst holds one website in 10GB of storage, with a limit on the total number of files. On an unlimited plan those caps go away: as many websites as you need, and storage to match. Mailboxes, databases and subdomains are unlimited on every plan, including Amethyst.
The disadvantages of unlimited hosting
Memory and CPU are not unlimited - In practice, while you are welcome to install 100 websites on your Emerald plan, you are probably going to come unstuck when a handful of those sites become busy. This is because the collective memory, CPU and I/O requirements may exceed what the server will allocate to your single cPanel account. When this happens the server will either queue processes or refuse to allocate more memory for your processes, and performance may be affected. By the way, you can always see if this is happening by checking your cPanel resource usage stats.
Poor portability of addon domains - If you want to move a single site to another hosting, or upgrade, you will have to manually extricate their data, databases, email etc from the rest of the websites on the same cPanel account, and then copy it all, manually, into another account. This is very time consuming and more likely to create disruption.
Everything shares one login - a more serious aspect of keeping every site in one account is the level of exposure to unauthorised access. Should ANY website in the cPanel account fall prey to a vulnerability, or if your cPanel login details fall into the wrong hands, then the attacker will gain access to all of the websites hosted on the same cPanel account.
Reseller Hosting (Unity, Trinity & Infinity)
A reseller plan gives you access to WHM (Web Host Manager), a web-based GUI - separate from the normal cPanel one - that provides the tools to design your cPanel hosting packages. You can then create cPanel accounts using those packages as templates. WHM allows you to do a lot more too - providing all the tools you need to manage your customers’ cPanel accounts (not all WHM features are available to resellers, but most are).
Each cPanel account can use as much or as little of your overall disk space allowance as you allow. Again, we limit the amount of memory, CPU power and I/O bandwidth that each of your cPanel accounts can consume.
So, if you are hosting several small to medium-sized websites, then a reseller plan makes a very wise choice indeed.
The advantages of reseller hosting
Improved user experience - Your customers can take ownership of their cPanel account, looking after their email settings, access stats, and creating their backup files for example.
Improved resource management - Because each customer uses a separate account, then no single website can hog all of your memory, CPU or I/O resources – avoiding disruption for your other customers.
Much easier to move/migrate - If a customer’s requirements exceed what your reseller plan can provide, then upgrading them to a dedicated cPanel plan, or moving them to another host is much easier since cPanel accounts are very portable and easily moved.
Your own branding - reseller plans are white-label, so your customers see your business rather than ours.
Improved Security - Because each customer uses a separate account, there is a useful security air-gap between them. If one of your customers’ accounts is hacked then the attacker will only be able to access that particular account. Your other customers’ accounts will remain safe.
A Trinity account lets you run 50 cPanel accounts, each with the same resources as our Amethyst plan, for less than twice the price of a single Emerald plan - good value if you are looking after sites for other people. See our reseller plans for current pricing.
The disadvantages of reseller hosting
There are real trade-offs:
Each account is smaller - a cPanel account on a reseller plan gets 1 CPU core, 2GB of RAM and 25 entry processes. That is the same as Amethyst, but half of what a Ruby plan gives a single account. A busy site moved from Ruby onto a reseller plan has less to work with, not more.
Disk space is one shared pool - your plan's storage is divided between all your cPanel accounts, not given to each of them. Running out means buying more storage or moving someone off.
You become the support desk - our support goes to you, not to your customers. If one of them has a problem at the weekend, they contact you, and you contact us.
Conclusion
If you haven’t already guessed - hosting a lot of websites on a single cPanel account, whether that's an unlimited plan or any other plan, is almost certainly not a good thing to do. It can make it difficult to disentangle sites, later on, exposes them to unnecessary security issues, and means that a single website might hog all of the power, making other websites slow down.
